@leahschrager

“Belfie” Gruin Gallery is pleased to present the first solo exhibition of Leah Schrager. Formerly New York City-based and recently relocated to the West Coast, Schrager has been described as both “a woman of her time” and a unique voice among new media artists. In 2015, at Parson’s, Leah Schrager developed @OnaArtist to see how one can make a celebrity as part of an art practice and as a reply to Richard Prince’s Instagram appropriation New Portrait series. By 2022, Schrager’s deceptively complex brand of feminism had accumulated over 5 million followers (the largest following for a female artist on Instagram). Schrager’s work battles with contemporary issues of celebrity culture, the male gaze, digital censorship, digital identity, and sex. Schrager’s blending of practices across performance art, social practice, online and audience participation is both a coy and economical approach to interactive performance work. It is no coincidence that ‘ONA’ derives from persona, onanism, oneness and ownership while also meaning female in Japanese. Using and photographing her own body as an art object through an alter ego called ‘ONA’ has allowed Schrager to create a striking body of visual work that references and self-appropriates her own image. Schrager elevates sex work to the level of contemporary art simply by asking it to be viewed as such. Her work leaves viewers more unsettled than porno-critical works that smoothly read as ‘feminist’. Schrager’s work sits in a more uncomfortable contemporary truth about the place of women in the art world. As quoted by Kurt McVey “the relationship between ONA and Leah Schrager the Artist, is the most fascinating thread in the larger narrative, as this juxtaposition allows for a meta-dialogue around how women navigate and present themselves online and in the art world”. Schrager is also one month away from giving birth to a baby boy. “Well if I showed my ass like that...this is the new, “My kid could have painted that!” – Kurt McVey “Very few artists in *both* Playboy and Artforum” – Jerry Saltz